Applications, online services, and/or websites may allow individuals or organizations to display advertisements alongside (or on top of) their own content. While advertisements may produce revenue for the creators of an application, they may also interfere with interactions between users and the application. For example, a pop-up advertisement may distract a user or block content hosted by an application that a user is trying to view. In addition, in some cases, attempting to remove or close an advertisement may direct a user to undesirable or potentially malicious content.
Unfortunately, traditional methods for preventing advertisements from being displayed to users may be unable to efficiently and/or effectively identify and block some advertisements. For example, a conventional ad-blocking technology may monitor network traffic to determine that a website is distributing an advertisement to a user's computing device. Such technologies may require a Virtual Private Network (VPN), which may result in excessive consumption of time and computing resources. For example, implementing a VPN to analyze traffic distributed to a computing device for advertisements may slow down or interfere with the transfer of traffic unrelated to advertisements. Therefore, the current application identifies and addresses a need for improved systems and methods for detecting advertisements displayed to users within applications.